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Former prisoner in Iran believes freedom unappreciated in Canada

Philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo spent four months in solitary in an Iranian prison. Now an associate York University professor, he examines the misuse of freedom in Canada.

Ramin Jahanbegloo spent four months in solitary in an Iranian prison. He now teaches at the University of Toronto and writes books.

By Ramin Jahanbegloo

Fri., Dec. 5, 2014

“I had traded the danger and violence of Iranian prisons for the violence and hypocrisy of a late-capitalist society.”

Ramin Jahanbegloo

Ramin Jahanbegloo is an Iranian Canadian philosopher who first taught at the University of Toronto from 1997 to 2001, and then returned to his native Iran. In his new memoir, Time Will Say Nothing: A Philosopher Survives an Iranian Prison, he writes about being arrested in 2006 and placed in solitary confinement for four months. An excerpt:

The day after our arrival I went to the University of Toronto. Melissa Williams was expecting me in her office at the Centre for Ethics. She had been an important part of the network that had worked for my liberation and return to Canada. What I owe her is beyond evaluation. She had arranged for me to give a homecoming lecture at the Isabel Bader Theatre on the topic of my last book, The Clash of Intolerances. Nearly 500 people attended this lecture and I was happy to see many of those I had met previously in Toronto. The president and provost of the university had also organized a lunch at Massey College in my honour. My office was ready and many people, including journalists, wanted to meet me.

But for me the most important thing was to resume my teaching. I have always considered teaching as a form of gardening. I am the gardener. I plant the seed and I wait to see the bud or the flower appear in a few years. I had initiated a course on the politics of non-violence, the first in Ontario and in Canada. I also decided to teach a graduate class on Iranian politics, finding that Canadians often spoke about Iran without knowing anything about it. For a man like me, who found himself suffering an existential crisis after imprisonment and exile, teaching was a princely encouragement and it touched me deeply, but the melancholy of immigration weighed upon my soul.

There was no question of a new job or a tenure-track position and I gradually realized that the main purpose in bringing me back to Canada had been the moral mileage that many people at the University of Toronto and in the Canadian government hoped to obtain. A high-placed official at the University of Toronto had even said this to Mohamad Tavakoli, who repeated it to me. However, in the long run, it seemed that none of the specialists of Iran at the Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations would be happy to have me as a competitor in Iranian Studies. Despite a great deal of student interest in a course on modern Iranian politics, I was only able to teach a one-semester course on the Iranian Constitutional Revolution.

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The thing I found most difficult was that many people at the University of Toronto seemed to feel that I had arrived in paradise, having been saved from a remote island surrounded by sharks. I still remember hearing an Iranian Canadian MPP at an Iranian community centre gala declare thoughtlessly, “Canada is the greatest country on Earth.” This might be the case for some people, especially Canadian MPPs who have not travelled much, but it was certainly not the case for me. I had traded the danger and violence of Iranian prisons for the violence and hypocrisy of a late-capitalist society. It was not a question of being part of a society with clean hands, because I saw no hands at all, especially those that might have helped the number of homeless people that I met every day around Toronto.

As I walked from my new dwelling to my office, I thought to myself that a city like Toronto, and a country like Canada, failed to make any gestures of love and empathy. Perhaps this is because capitalism thinks only with its brain, not with its heart, and empathy is a language of the heart. I was deeply shocked that in most of my meetings with colleagues, journalists and younger Canadians, the face of love was always hidden behind a veil of cold logic.

After the first few months of my return to Toronto, I began to rebel against the conformism that I saw every day. I was troubled and perplexed that there didn’t seem to be a single rebellious soul among my young students. As well, there were many times when they considered mediocrity to be a form of normality. At every opportunity I repeated to my Canadian students that without nobility of spirit every society is doomed to mediocrity. However, with one exception, Richie Nojang Khatami, who later became my assistant and my close friend, most of my students gave me the impression that centuries of human civilization had made no impression on them and that they reduced every bit of human agency to seeking grades, entering law school and making a lot of money as a corporate lawyer. I began to feel more and more as if we were entering our 25th hour, when it is too late for any form of reason or change.

In the months that followed, I was invited to become a Scholar at Risk at Massey College and an associate fellow at Trinity College. Ironically, these invitations reminded me of the quote by Groucho Marx: “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.” Nothing had changed in my situation. I had moved from a society dominated by clerical nomenclature to an enclave of second-class snobs who were intellectually crippled by their meaningless existence in well-guarded clubs. I was especially irritated by one white woman who guarded the entrance of Massey College and who seemed to be allergic to my dark-haired Iranian colleagues, who were stopped at the door each time they wanted to have lunch with me. This was one occasion among others when I realized that what was said about Canadian multiculturalism and fair play in theory was not necessarily true in practice. It is time, I thought, for a deeper exploration of the Canadian psyche and a clearer definition of what it means to be Canadian.

As the months passed and I was caught up in the cyclic drama of my new life, depression came on me like a cloud. I had to escape to Spain in the summers to feel rested and renewed. But as soon as we returned to Toronto, I had the same feeling of being in a spiritual void. It was now 2009 and every Iranian was eagerly following the post-election riots and repression inside Iran. I had started to work on my next book, The Gandhian Moment, for Harvard University Press and had been solicited by Palgrave to write a book on Iran and to organize a huge conference on Iranian civil society.

I resumed my Saturday philosophy classes in Persian, called Agora Philosophical Forum, for the Iranian community in Canada. We had open weekly meetings at OISE (the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education) and I began the classes with topics like freedom, ethics, modernity and non-violence and later turned to Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Heidegger. I was excited to find a forum where I could practise philosophy in a Socratic manner, something I missed terribly in my colloquial debates with my colleagues. Though a professor in the university, I was never invited to give a lecture in the philosophy department. This reminds me of what Schopenhauer said: “In philosophy at the universities truth occupies only a secondary place and, if called upon, she must get up and make room for another attribute.”

As time passed, I was besieged by what I can call the temptation of freedom. Strangely enough, I found more interest in the idea of freedom among my Iranian students in Canada, who were concerned with a non-free country like Iran, than among my Canadian colleagues, living in a free country like Canada. This was also the case with the concept of law. While my Iranian students were crying out for law as an emancipator concept, my Canadian colleagues and students looked upon it as a set of principles printed on fine paper. Most of the time, they recited the law and then leaned back and took it for granted, as if justice would be done automatically. But justice was not done. This was one of the issues I could not shy away from while living in Canada. I had a terrible feeling that every step I took was influenced by the everyday justice system, whose value decisions affected my life and destiny.

No one remains unchanged by the experience of exile. Some lose their identity because of fear or because of flattery. Some very few are tempered by the art of questioning. I chose a third way by becoming blunt and straightforward. But I had to confront all the problems of exile. I was committed to the whole risk of living a new life. Believing in oneself was the price of survival. But problems came to me as a collection of absurdities. I was convinced, as most immigrants are in Canada, that the best way forward was to find a way to take a step toward the happiness and comfort of my child. We had a hard time finding a daycare for her and were told that people sign their kids up for daycare even before they are born. I suppose, in the same spirit, one has to sign a child up for university before the child has even learned to read and write. I wonder if such things are not a good way to lose one’s faith in the sanity of Western civilization.

Yet in the whole absurdity of our everyday life in Toronto, the most important issue remains for me that of diversity and dialogue. This was an untimely thought that came to me frequently. I found Toronto to be a city of diversity that pays no attention to the best way to celebrate its differences. One cannot celebrate diversities and differences without really engaging in a dialogue with them. This is what, in my opinion, differentiates Toronto from London, Paris and Berlin. People enjoy participating in carnivals and Harbourfront Festivals, but they don’t necessary learn more about Iranians, Somalis, Pakistanis and others by eating their food and listening to their music.

I was becoming more and more aware that I lacked a Canadian identity. I started reading about Canada and listening to anyone who could show me a way to claim identity in this country. The thought of what sort of Canadian identity would have led me to endure imprisonment for 125 days troubled me. I came up with a quote by Northrop Frye, conceivably Canada’s most celebrated cultural theorist: “Historically, a Canadian is an American who rejects the Revolution.” This idea presents itself in a variety of aspects. For many English-speaking conservative Canadians, it remains a label of honour. Remember what Winston Churchill said about this country: “Canada is the linchpin of the English-speaking world. Canada, with those relations of friendly, affectionate intimacy with the United States on the one hand and with her unswerving fidelity to the British Commonwealth and the Motherland on the other, is the link which joins together these great branches of the human family.”

But I wonder if new Canadians still believe in England in terms of “the Motherland,” a view that is more typical of a white and English-speaking Canada. Putting aside the laws and regulations and the $20 bill, not all Canadians really think in terms of British royalty, although more Canadians are passionate about Prince William and Kate Middleton than about Canadian Nobel Prize recipient Alice Munro. This would not be the case in a country like France, which celebrated in grandeur the 50th anniversary of the death of Algerian-born writer Albert Camus. It doesn’t come as a surprise that a French politician like Charles De Gaulle would ask, “How can anyone govern a nation that has 246 different kinds of cheese?” De Gaulle was absolutely right about France and its culture, but could we say the same thing about Canada?

It is difficult to say how one is or becomes Canadian. Most nations today have a strong sense of identity but Canadians are still in pursuit of a unified identity to give a deep-rooted pattern and a spiritual meaning to their lives. In Canada, national identity is an immigrant identity. Students who share a classroom in a Canadian university or those who share an office space in a Canadian firm in Toronto or Vancouver neither have common and shared values nor participate in a shared space of identity. For my Muslim students Islam is a hard value and it comes first, but being Canadian is a soft value and always comes second. For Iranian Canadians or Arab Canadians who are raised in Canada, being Iranian or Arab is far more important than being a Canadian.

You need a great imagination to understand how to be proud of being a Canadian — although most Canadians are — especially given the fact that First Nations were stripped of rights over their lands, effectively being treated as obstacles to resource extraction and removed, something that occurred throughout the Americas. Newcomers to this land of hope don’t learn much about those who lived here before, though there has been much more coverage of this subject by the media in the last years. But discussing First Nations does not help bring dissident views to the fore. Lacking both the historical experience and the arrogance of the Americans, Canadians do not exhibit a chauvinistic sentiment of being Canadian, but at the same time there is no sense of “Canadianness” in Canada.

I had never believed that anyone who becomes part of Canada must come to the country by way of white Canadians. This has been one of the errors in the way Canadian history is presented, and yet my experience as an Iranian philosopher in Canada substantiated the idea that most of Canada is controlled by white Canadians. I was deeply perturbed by the fact that more than 90 per cent of my colleagues in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto were white. It is true that I found it difficult to call Canada home, because home for me is a personal feeling. But I also found it difficult to have my intellectual work underestimated because I was not a white Canadian or was not a member of a well-known family in this country. I realized bitterly that education in Canada had nothing to do with knowledge but rather, despite all that is said, that money is the rule of the game. This reminded me of how the money-makers and money-seekers who rule our world have no sense of the world that they are ruining. To see this, let us go back a few years in time.

Many years ago, when I came back to Toronto after a year of post-doctoral study at Harvard University and started teaching as an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto, I was contacted by a small consulting firm. Not knowing anything about business, I was curious about what kind of help I could offer them. It turned out that I was being hired part-time as a research and development specialist, asked to help the firm develop brands and put together new concepts for workshops. My boss, a white Canadian, was a young man who had worked previously with different consultancy groups, but his knowledge of the world did not go further than the Harvard Business Review. His hero was Jack Welch, former CEO for General Electric. One of the workshops was prepared for a North American client, a giant multinational firm. The Canadian CEO of this firm was a millionaire who had no knowledge of the arts or culture but presented himself as someone who appreciated French wine and opera.

Once, on the occasion of a party in his honour, I was asked by my boss, who was also ignorant of anything in human culture that went beyond business and money-making, to provide our client with a good wine and an opera CD. I decided to go with a Châteauneuf-du-Pape 1998 and Puccini’s Tosca. During the party to entertain our guest, I started talking to him about wine and opera but realized with astonishment that not only did he not know anything about wine, but he was also ignorant about very simple facts in the history of opera. The only thing that was important in his eyes was to pay a high price for bottles of French wine and to put on his tuxedo for operas at the Canadian Opera Company. This is an example of the difference between those who produce high culture and those who consume it. The former are often poor and jobless and beg for grants from the Canada Council for the Arts, while the latter flatter themselves that they know high culture because they buy books but do not read them.

This is also true for Canadian universities. While I continued to fight for a longer-term position at the University of Toronto, everyone around me talked about getting grants. This was a new phenomenon that I had not experienced in France, India or Iran. I realized that in Canada the most respected academic is not the person who has the greatest knowledge of cultures and the achievements of civilization but the one who gets the greatest number of grants. Salaried, tenured and pensioned, many academics find themselves chained to the wheel of a once-respected profession that grinds down their capacity for critical thinking. Narrow professional self-interests destroy their public interests. Ignoring their moral responsibilities, many academics in Canada, and in North America in general, have degraded and abandoned the idea of contributing to the public sphere and have become uncritical supporters of mass culture.

This withdrawal has helped celebrities to replace academics as the most notable actors in our contemporary world. Scholars are no longer engaged in discussing values but are only interested in discussing facts. The attempt by intellectuals in academia and other professional institutions to pretend that it is politically correct and wise to dismiss the moral imperatives of the public sphere confuses ethical questions with the special needs of career-making. As a result, I found myself among people who had abdicated their authority to speak truth to power and had become incapable of carrying out their critical functions.

From Chapter 15 of Time Will Say Nothing: A Philosopher Survives an Iranian Prison, by Ramin Jahanbegloo. Available from the uofrpress.caUniversity of Regina PressEND, Amazon and local bookstores.

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